From Chaos to Clarity: How Journaling Can Help Men with ADHD Prioritize Self-Care
It’s common for men to have good and bad days. But why did we have a good or bad day? Well, there can be many factors. If we ate, what we ate, if we exercised, if we took our ADHD meds, if we were stressed about something, if we let frustrations build up, if we made a mistake. Things like this and other anxieties sometimes eat us alive.
But what can we do about it?
I’m going to say a dreaded word that many of you have heard, and many of you have tried, and like me, many of you feel that you have failed at doing.
Journaling.
Look, I get it, but as a professional in this field, journaling is important for our mental health. Not only that, it’s also one of the most effective forms of self-care that we can do for ourselves.
But what does that mean?
What is Journaling?
But let’s be clear, journaling is not just about writing whatever comes to mind. It’s about making sure that we are asking ourselves specific questions that apply to managing ourselves and our ADHD. Journaling without having a direction is just brain dumping. Which has its own value, (We’ll talk about that later.) but not what we are referring to now. So when we are journaling for self-care we need to be specific, and ask ourselves things like:
How do we feel in the morning?
How are we sleeping? How many hours? What’s keeping us awake?
Journaling doesn’t always have to be negative either. In the evening we may sit down and ask ourselves different questions, such as:
What is something good that happened to me today?
What is something I am grateful for?
What is something good about me?
What is something someone did for me today? Did I thank them?
Knowing the answers to these things, and other things that may come up as important for you, is why it’s important to journal so we can help us keep track of all the things that contribute to us having days where our ADHD seems out of control. Having a gratitude journal where consistently put positive affirmations and experiences also helps us see more of the positive in life, and not just the negativity.
When Should We Journal?
There are a lot of reasons to journal, for example, how we are sleeping, or better yet how we are not sleeping. Many of us have been there, trying to sleep, and then our brains start spinning all of our anxieties out into the world. We can’t sleep, and we reach over, grab our phone, and the next thing we know it’s 4 a.m. and we have 2 hours before we have to get ready for work.
When you’re being kept up at night with all the anxieties, fears, depressive ideations, don’t grab your phone, it’s a time-suck and you will have an even worse time of it. Instead, pull out a journal and jot all of that down, get it out of your head and onto paper.
By writing it down this breaks up the death spiral of thoughts and issues and allows you to process them easier and go to sleep (most of the time). But more importantly, it lets you recognize what things are causing you to have a bad day.
If you’re unsure how to even begin to journal, consider asking yourself a couple of questions.
Why are you feeling anxious or stressed?
What are the thoughts that are racing through?
Knowing the answers to these questions can help you work through what it is that’s keeping you awake, or in the case of the latter question may cause you to start doing a brain dump of every racing thought that you are having. This is brain dumping, and it is hugely valuable when it comes to these kinds of situations. Once the information is out of your head and on paper, regardless of if it makes sense or not, you’ll find your racing thoughts have slowed down tremendously.
Another time to journal is if you have an emotional dysregulation/RSD moment where you lose control and have a blow up. Part of the aftermath, after you get control of yourself, is a great time to write about it and figure out:
What happened?
What led up to it?
Were you stressed? Frustrated? Anxious? If so, what about?
Did you have a bad night’s sleep the night(s) before?
Having this kind of information helps you and your therapist figure out what triggered it. It also teaches you how to recognize when you’re going to have bad days and plan for them. It lets you know you need to rest, to spend time with the family instead of work, or another type of activity that allows you to blow off steam, before you explode again.
Another thing that we can use journaling for is imposter syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is a particularly insidious issue that people with ADHD face. It can hit us at any time and, similarly to RSD, can also be caused by triggers. However, this is usually internally caused and directed. Our own thoughts and fears lying to us about who we are, what others think of us, or our capabilities.
So if you are having Imposter Syndrome issues at work, at home, as a father, or as a friend, this is a prime time to journal and figure out:
What is causing the fear or feeling of inadequacy?
Is this something that is true about yourself?
Do you have any evidence that counters this fear or feeling?
Using journaling can help you to start processing some of these thoughts and find the lies and the insecurities that we are dealing with, and counter them with the positive affirmations and the support that we get from our friends and family.
Journaling and Your Mental Health Care
Having this information in our journal also helps us when it comes to taking these kinds of things to our doctors and therapists. Considering our memory doesn’t work well enough to remember these kinds of details when we invariably are asked by the therapist:
“What triggered these feelings?”
and we look at them as if they are stupid and say:
“I have ADHD. That’s what happened.”
But the thing is, at the moment, we likely did understand why we felt it. A boss said something. We made a stupid mistake. We yelled at our kids. Our spouse was angry because we forgot a chore.
Something happened, and it triggered the memories that many of us have of failing in the past, of things people said when we screwed up. But a few days later, or even longer, we often won’t remember the things we have gone through. We will only remember the more recent mistakes rather than the ones that reminded us of that particular one.
The Case For Journaling
I get the stigma around journaling. But the truth is, journaling about these kinds of things will allow you to keep a visual and documented record of when your ADHD symptoms are either relaxed or heightened. With this information, you, your doctor, or therapist will soon be able to recognize patterns as to why some days are good while other days are not so much. Doing brain dumps will allow you to get the anxiety thoughts out when they are trying to keep you up at night, and allow you to get more sleep. Journaling is a huge part of self-care that will save you a lot of time and money and, by capitalizing on those visits to your psychiatrist, therapist, and coach and making them much more productive.
A final thing on journaling. You do not have to journal every day. The goal for journaling, just as for any other habit we are putting in place, is to do it as consistently as you are able to until you do it more often than you don’t.
Shane Thrapp is a Certified ADHD Life, Relationship, and Career Coach.
Through his business, Creating Order From Chaos, he has helped hundreds of people find their paths through the chaos of life with ADHD and find their order and purpose.
He is also the Operations Director for our nonprofit Men’s ADHD Support Group, a board member for the Inattentive ADHD Coalition, and a public speaker who works to be a voice in advocacy for adult ADHD awareness.
If you want to help support our efforts, then please consider donating so that that we can keep Inspiring, Educating, and Empowering men to thrive with their ADHD.
